Missional Church

A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America

Darrell L. Guder, Daniel L. Guder

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781467428934
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Christlicher Dienst

What would a theology of the Church look like that took seriously the fact that North America is now itself a mission field? This question lies at the foundation of this volume written by an ecumenical team of six noted missiologists—Lois Barrett, Inagrace T. Dietterich, Darrell L. Guder, George R. Hunsberger, Alan J. Roxburgh, and Craig Van Gelder. The result of a three-year research project undertaken by The Gospel and Our Culture Network, this book issues a firm challenge for the church to recover its missional call right here in North America, while also offering the tools to help it do so. The authors examine North America's secular culture and the church's loss of dominance in today's society. They then present a biblically based theology that takes seriously the church's missional vocation and draw out the consequences of this theology for the structure and institutions of the church.

• 1 •

Missional Church:

From Sending to Being Sent

As we move toward the end of the century, more and more commentators are proposing their versions of the “great new fact of our time.” Among the many great new facts suggested, Christians in North America would likely point to two. On the one hand, during the twentieth century Christianity has become a truly worldwide movement, with churches established on every continent and among every major cultural group. The great modern missionary movement has been, despite all the controversy and debate, a truly successful enterprise. On the other hand, while modern missions have led to an expansion of world Christianity, Christianity in North America has moved (or been moved) away from its position of dominance as it has experienced the loss not only of numbers but of power and influence within society.

The United States is still, by all accounts, a very religious society. The pollsters affirm that Americans and Canadians believe in God, pray regularly, and consider themselves religious. But they find less and less reason to express their faith by joining a Christian church. North American religiosity is changing profoundly by becoming more pluralistic, more individualistic, and more private. Religion fits into North American secularism in a remarkable synthesis that the student of religious behavior finds fascinating. But for the Christian who takes the gospel of Jesus Christ seriously, this religiosity is a weighty challenge.

It is not the purpose of this book to duplicate the many studies of the changing religiosity of North American society. For our purposes, the result of the process is important. The Christian church finds itself in a very different place in relation to its context. Rather than occupying a central and influential place, North American Christian churches are increasingly marginalized, so much so that in our urban areas they represent a minority movement. It is by now a truism to speak of North America as a mission field. Our concern is the way that the Christian churches are responding to this challenge.

The reactions to this shifting ecclesial scene¹ in North America have been diverse. Extensive research on this topic has spawned a boom in the field of religious sociology, accompanied by an explosion in the number and variety of publications. At the same time, consulting agencies and programs whose sole aim is to help changing churches cope with their changing situation have proliferated. One can find a workshop or seminar on virtually every aspect of churchly life. The typical religious bookstore in North America overflows with books on successful churches with “add-water-and-stir” instructions on how to follow their example, how-to manuals for every conceivable problem a struggling congregation might face, and analyses of the myriad crises with which the church is grappling.

The crises are certainly many and complex: diminishing numbers, clergy burnout, the loss of youth, the end of denominational loyalty, biblical illiteracy, divisions in the ranks, the electronic church and its various corruptions, the irrelevance of traditional forms of worship, the loss of genuine spirituality, and widespread confusion about both the purpose and the message of the church of Jesus Christ. The typical North American response to our situation is to analyze the problem and find a solution. These solutions tend to be methodological. Arrange all the components of the church landscape differently, and many assume that the problem can be solved. Or use the best demographic or psychological or sociological insights, and one can redesign the church for success in our changing context. All it takes, it would seem, is money, talent, time, and commitment.

One should not be surprised that, in this time of crisis, the megachurch appears to many as a successful and eminently North American way to move from problem to problem solving. No doubt we can learn much from the emergence and proliferation of nontraditional churches that now dot the margins of our urban centers. The contrast between their success and the persistent malaise of traditional denominational churches sets in high relief the crises of the latter. Moreover, the vast array of programmatic and methodological solutions on the market today only underlines the scope of the crisis.

The basic thesis of this book is that the answer to the crisis of the North American church will not be found at the level of method and problem solving. We share the conviction of a growing consensus of Christians in North America that the problem is much more deeply rooted. It has to do with who we are and what we are for. The real issues in the current crisis of the Christian church are spiritual and theological. That is what this study is about.

The Genesis of Our Study

This book arises out of a study and research process inaugurated by the Gospel and Our Culture Network. The Network emerged in North America in the late 1980s as the continuation, on this side of the Atlantic, of the Gospel and Culture discussion initiated in Great Britain during 1983 by the publication of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin’s short monograph, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches.² The concerns raised by the bishop were certainly not new. But as a missionary statesman and leader who had returned after decades in India to minister in Britain, Newbigin analyzed with penetrating clarity the challenge presented by the changing context of Western society. In a word, what had once been a Christendom society was now clearly post-Christian, and in many ways, anti-Christian. Newbigin brought into public discussion a theological consensus that had long been forming among missiologists and theologians. He then focused that consensus on the concrete reality of Western society, as it has taken shape in this century. His conclusions have mobilized Christian thinkers and leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.

The missiological consensus that Newbigin focused on our situation may be summarized with the term missio Dei, “mission of God.” This consensus emerged out of the theological reflection on the amazing missionary expansion of the last three hundred years. Without discounting the remarkable response of men and women in previously unevangelized cultures, and the emergence of strong and vibrant Christian churches across the world, many began to be concerned about the shape of that mission. It became increasingly clear that Western mission had been very much a European-church-centered enterprise. The gospel to which we testified around the world had been passed along in the cultural shape of the Western church. This church was the result of centuries of Western cultural tradition that we define in this book as “Christendom.” The subtle assumption of much Western mission was that the church’s missionary mandate lay not only in forming the church of Jesus Christ, but in shaping the Christian communities that it birthed in the image of the church of western European culture.

This ecclesiocentric understanding of mission has been replaced during this century by a profoundly theocentric reconceptualization of Christian mission. We have come to see that mission is not merely an activity of the church. Rather, mission is the result of God’s initiative, rooted in God’s purposes to restore and heal creation. “Mission” means “sending,” and it is the central biblical theme describing the purpose of God’s action in human history. God’s mission began with the call of Israel to receive God’s blessings in order to be a blessing to the nations. God’s mission unfolded in the history of God’s people across the centuries recorded in Scripture, and it reached its revelatory climax in the incarnation of God’s work of salvation in Jesus ministering, crucified, and resurrected. God’s mission continued then in the sending of the Spirit to call forth and empower the church as the witness to God’s good news in Jesus Christ. It continues today in the worldwide witness of churches in every culture to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and it moves toward the promised consummation of God’s salvation in the eschaton (“last” or “final day”).

We have learned to speak of God as a “missionary God.” Thus we have learned to understand the church as a “sent people.” “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21).

This missional reorientation of our theology is the result of a broad biblical and theological awakening that has begun to hear the gospel in fresh ways. God’s character and purpose as a sending or missionary God redefines our understanding of the Trinity.

Mission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It [is] thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine of the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit [is] expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world.³

This trinitarian point of entry into our theology of the church necessarily shifts all the accents in our ecclesiology. As it leads us to see the church as the instrument of God’s mission, it also forces us to recognize the ways in which the Western church has tended to shape and fit the gospel into its cultural context and made the church’s institutional extension and survival its priority. As we have used the tools of biblical scholarship carefully, we have begun to learn that the biblical message is more radical, more inclusive, more transforming than we have allowed it to be. In particular, we have begun to see that the church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness. God’s mission embraces all of creation. “God so loved the world” is the emphasis of the beloved gospel summary in John 3:16. This does not mean that the church is not essential to God’s work of salvation—it is. But it is essential as God’s chosen people “who are blessed to be a blessing to the nations” (Gen. 12).

Bishop Newbigin and others have helped us to see that God’s mission is calling and sending us, the church of Jesus Christ, to be a missionary church in our own societies, in the cultures in which we find ourselves. These cultures are no longer Christian; some would argue that they never were. Now, however, their character as a mission field is so obvious as to need no demonstration. The issue for the Christian church is its faithful response to this challenge. But that is also its problem.

Neither the structures nor the theology of our established Western traditional churches is missional. They are shaped by the legacy of Christendom. That is, they have been formed by centuries in which Western civilization considered itself formally and officially Christian. This legacy may be described as the Constantinian system, because this presumption was seeded in the fourth century, when the Roman Emperor Constantine granted the Christian church special favors and privileges. In subsequent centuries, the Christian church shaped the religious and cultural life of all Europe. The cultures that resulted in Europe and later in North America are called Constantinian, or Christendom, or technically the corpus Christianum. In this book, when we speak of Christendom we are referring to the system of church-state partnership and cultural hegemony in which the Christian religion was the protected and privileged religion of society and the church its legally established institutional form. Even when the legal structures of Christendom have been removed (as in North America), the legacy continues as a pattern of powerful traditions, attitudes, and social structures that we describe as “functional Christendom.”

In the ecclesiocentric approach of Christendom, mission became only one of the many programs of the church. Mission boards emerged in Western churches to do the work of foreign mission. Yet even here the Western churches understood themselves as sending churches, and they assumed the destination of their sending to be the pagan reaches of the world that needed both the gospel and “the benefits of Western civilization.” In like manner, Western churches also developed home mission or inner mission, as the emerging secularism of Western societies presented us with new challenges. But it has taken us decades to realize that mission is not just a program of the church. It defines the church as God’s sent people. Either we are defined by mission, or we reduce the scope of the gospel and the mandate of the church. Thus our challenge today is to move from church with mission to missional church.

One needs only to visit North American congregations to find that the church-centered approach to mission is alive and well. Congregations still tend to view missions as one of several programs of the church. Evangelism, when present, is usually defined as member recruitment at the local level and as church planting at the regional level. The sending-receiving mentality is still strong as churches collect funds and send them off to genuine mission enterprises elsewhere. Indeed, the main business of many mission committees is to determine how to spend the mission budget rather than view the entire congregational budget as an exercise in mission.

As denominational and centralized structures diminish in importance and power, local congregations are beginning to see their own context as their mission. But even with that shift, few have taken the necessary steps to redefine themselves as missionary by their very nature.

This gap between theological reorientation and actual practice is still reflected in much North American theological education. The doctrine of the church, ecclesiology, can and is still taught with little or no reference to the church’s missionary vocation. Mission, or missiology, is a somewhat marginalized discipline, taught usually as one of the subjects in practical theology. There is little curricular evidence that “mission is the mother of theology.”⁴

The obvious fact that what we once regarded as Christendom is now a post-Constantinian, post-Christendom, and even post-Christian mission field stands in bold contrast today with the apparent lethargy of established church traditions in addressing their new situation both creatively and faithfully. Yet this helpfully highlights the need for and providential appearance of a theological revolution in missional thinking that centers the body of Christ on God’s mission rather than post-Christendom’s concern for the church’s institutional maintenance.

Like the Gospel and Culture discussions that spawned it, this book focuses on the need for such a theological revolution and seeks to propel that movement by reshaping the way we do our theology of the church. For this reason, we ask ourselves here, What would an understanding of the church (an ecclesiology) look like if it were truly missional in design and definition?

Our Research Approach

The Gospel and Our Culture Network brings together “Christian leaders from a wide array of churches and organizations who are working together on the frontier of the missionary encounter of the gospel with North American assumptions and perspectives, preferences and practices.” In its discussion to date, the Network’s participants have worked on three major thematic areas. We have addressed North American culture by trying to “discern the shifting worlds so radically reshaping our lives and the places where God is at work in them.” We have probed the gospel by searchi...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Project Team Members
• 1. Missional Church: From Sending to Being Sent
• 2. Missional Context: Understanding North American Culture
• 3. Missional Challenge: Understanding the Church in North America
• 4. Missional Vocation: Called and Sent to Represent the Reign of God
• 5. Missional Witness: The Church as Apostle to the World
• 6. Missional Community: Cultivating Communities of the Holy Spirit
• 7. Missional Leadership: Equipping God’s People for Mission
• 8. Missional Structures: The Particular Community
• 9. Missional Connectedness: The Community of Communities in Mission
• Bibliography for Research on a Missional Ecclesiology for North America